


Agathokakological

by Real_Geek_Girl_Goddess



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: M/M, Multi, POV Ray, POV Sam Wilson, Politics, Post-Battle of Sokovia, Sam Wilson-centric, Sokovia Accords, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 03:14:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15787800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Real_Geek_Girl_Goddess/pseuds/Real_Geek_Girl_Goddess
Summary: A mission in Eastern Europe, from Sam's perspective.





	Agathokakological

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MeganMoonlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeganMoonlight/gifts).



Agathokakological  
\--  
Agathokakological – adjective; ag·a·tho·kak·o·log·i·cal; \ ¦a-gə-(ˌ)thō-ˌka-kə-¦lä-ji-kəl \; composed of both good and evil.  
\--

Soaring this high up, with the sun burning his skin through his clothes, with no wind to speak of, Sam could almost let himself relax. Redwing didn’t report anything they didn’t already know; after the refit from Shuri (who he’s sure is the smartest person in the universe) he doesn’t know how he worked without Redwing being so intuitive. They all check in with Steve a final time before its go-time. Wanda lets loose hell once Steve gives her the go-ahead. He uses Redwing to give Wanda some covering fire on her six while he waits for Steve and Natasha to clear all the Sokovians out of the gulag. 

After the Avengers had saved the earth from getting sky-fucked by Ultron with Sokovia, there’d obviously come the issue of rebuilding Sokovia. Even with Stark Industries footing most of the bill, it was going to take decades, if not centuries, for Sokovia to recover – not that Sokovia had been in that great of shape to begin with. Sokovia had almost always been that Eastern European country that no one else in Europe had ever wanted to exist. In the 1300s, a brutal medieval warlord of suspiciously dark complexion, who was rumored to have been part Romani and/or part Muslim, and his beloved Crypto-Jewish queen, bastard daughter of a ‘Court Jew’ and a middling Germanic princess, had established Sokovia to be a haven for all of Europe’s unwanted peoples. Sokovia, it turned out, much to the horror their neighbors, was almost perfectly impenetrable – and, for a time, it looked like their dream had come true. 

But, when you’re a Christian nation in name only, beset on all sides by nations that want most of your population dead simply because they dare to exist – the very least they’re going to do is refuse to trade with you. (At least, that’s how Wanda explained it when she had been making them paprikash and Steve had remarked that his old Hungarian neighbors had added in paprika by the fistful instead of the small pinches of paprika that she was using.) And then, in the 20th Century, when the West demanded that Stalin stop murdering his own people by the millions, the Soviet Union decided to use Sokovia as their “dumping ground” for all their “undesirables”. Which, honestly, just went over great with everyone.

(Straight up, the whole thing gave Sam major déjà vu to watching Yugoslavia tear itself to shreds on the news when he’d been a kid. Of course, back then, the world was simpler and the United States was the hero, in the end. Now that he was older and jaded? There was only one man he could entrust with that kind of love and devotion.)  
And now that Sokovia was more a mountain of rubble that was theoretically a country than somewhere suitable for human occupation, Sokovians had to rely on the hospitality of their notoriously friendly neighbors. Immediately afterwards, the whole world was obviously invested in rebuilding; world leaders made grand speeches, somberly toured through the destruction, fed precious few of the starving children for photo ops, and solemnly contemplating the destroyed remains of Ultron’s drones. But with the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the turnover rates of Twitter hashtags people turned their attention, and most critically their donations, away to different things. Sam thought that, for most people, safely hidden away from the destruction of Sokovia, they actively don’t want to think about Sokovia because it invokes the underlying unease that took hold over the world that no one really wants to contemplate for too long: an alien artificial intelligence was on the internet for a sum total of five minutes, analyzed the whole of humanity, and decided that the best course of action was to destroy humanity as quickly as possible. 

And as soon as the world’s attention lay elsewhere, Sokovian refugee camps became Sokovian gulags. Fear-mongering fascists, taking advantage of the global shift to the right, used Sokovians within their borders to blame for everything – from a nonexistent uptick in rape and murders supposedly committed by Sokovians to the potential of austerity measures because of the “extra mouths to feed”, never mind the fact that most of the cost of maintaining the Sokovians was being billed to Stark Industries directly or indirectly. Far-right governments were using the situation as an excuse to decrease taxes to their ruling oligarchs. 

As a result, it unfortunately isn’t all that uncommon anymore to see fascist graffiti, in not in so many words, calling for European Christians to “root out the cuckoo birds from the nest” in any part of Europe, nowadays. (He and Steve had seen graffiti like that when they’d been in Glasgow last week to plan this mission in Wanda’s new digs; they’d also helped some native Glaswegians clean it off the wall.) In the end, however, these fascists took power and have kicked off such an intense racist fervor against Jewish and Romani and Muslim Sokovians that it’s not enough to kick them out of their countries – which Stark Industries had been trying to accomplish as fast as possible by getting Sokovians to friendlier countries as fast as possible – the far-right fascists want them dead, at whatever cost. 

So, naturally, the race was on to get Sokovians, especially the non-Christian Sokovians, out of Europe. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that the Sokovian ruling elite – Christians all of them, ensconced in power as proxies by the Austro-Hungarian Empire – who, when no one was looking, rescinded the citizenship for every non-Christian Sokovian in a desperate bid to prevent Sokovia from being annexed piecemeal by their more powerful, trigger-happy, fascist neighbors who have accused Sokovia of selling out to the West and becoming “Euro-Stark-Land,” which is obviously the first part of the West’s plan to colonize and destroy Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Sokovians became stateless overnight and aid organizations and diplomatic envoys were unable to get to them. 

Of course, no one had let the Avengers in on the chaos until the UN and several world governments had to release this information to try and get ahead of the story that hacktivist organizations were about to leak to the press. This had been a few weeks after their Civil War, as the twenty-four-hour cable news shows called it. Sam’s gut tells him that Tony wouldn’t have signed off on the Accords if he’d known how royally the international community was bending over backwards to fuck the Sokovians over. (It’s the same part of his gut that told him to trust the judgment of his jogging buddy when Steve told him HYDRA had taken over SHIELD and later to go hunting for Bucky. But, then a phantom ache rises in his chest where Tony knocked him to the ground when Rhodey… and he finds himself double-checking his own judgement like when he was fresh from the war and jumping at every stray shadow in his peripheral vision.) He and Steve, still recuperating in Wakanda, had been horrified. Although, Steve was more heartbroken than most; he and Bucky fought and ostensibly died in a war to end fascism and the universe decides to fling them into a future where they get to see fascism on the rise again, where they get to see people – children – in cages again. 

So, yeah, when it’s his turn to lay down some covering fire for Natasha and Steve, he aims to maim instead of kill; death would be too kind, they deserve some lifelong suffering after what they’ve done. When they’ve got the Sokovians out to Nakia’s refugee retrieval team to get them loaded up onto Wakandan stealth aircraft, and Wanda’s still maiming the remaining fascists, he and Natasha quickly get to the main bureaucratic office and see that Clint has already shot the commandant dead, the fascist lowlife they were going to interrogate for information about where they could find the other Sokovian gulags. 

Natasha just sighs and rubs her temples, “And this is why you’re not allowed to go undercover, birdbrain.” 

“I thought I was birdbrain,” Sam leans against the door frame, watching their six and totally not trying to catch his breath. 

“Hey!” Clint, nonplussed at the fact that he’s covered in a dead man’s tacky blood, waves a Wakandan doodad over the commandant’s computer to clone it for further study, “I was here first, don’t horn in on my schtick.”

Sam rolls his eyes skyward.

“I’m telling on you to Coulson,” Natasha says, helping Clint gather all the physical intel into a duffel bag.

“Nat, if that barely did anything when we were at SHIELD, do you think it’s going to accomplish anything when we’re all more or less on the lam?” 

“Not if she says that Steve was very disappointed in your behavior on the mission,” Sam adds as they leave the building, passing Clint his bow and quiver. 

Clint just gives them a shit-eating grin before decloaking a Wakandan bodycam on a chain around his neck and pressing a button on it to allow it to upload the raw data to their aircraft waiting for them out in the woods and Shuri’s laboratory, “Steve’s very what now?” 

“You’re an ass,” Natasha smirks before heading off to go talk Wanda down. 

“Hey, Steve,” Clint asks as soon as he’s patched in to their com link. 

“Yeah, Hawkeye?” Steve answers, sounding out of breath. Sam forces himself to breathe easy and press his toes to the bottom of his shoes. He’s safe on the ground, he’s safe on the ground, he’s safe on the ground, he reminds himself. 

“They’ve got more people here than just Sokovians.” 

“Where?” Steve asks. 

“In the southernmost building. A new guy called Darhk, that’s D-A-R-H-K, is rising through the ranks here. He’s torturing them for intel. Some of them might be enhanced.”  
“They’re in the building that’s on fire right now?” Sam asks, deadpan. 

Clint nods. 

Sam shrugs, “Alright, let’s do this.” He takes off at a run and loops back around to pick Clint up with his legs while Steve coordinates with everyone else to spearhead an attack on the building that’s on fire. 

Sam circles the warehouse until he finds a window big enough to throw Clint into. “Y’know where they are?” 

“Yeah,” Clint nods and then he’s gone behind the flames. Sam and Redwing put down the fascists trying to escape the fire, laying down covering fire when Steve shows up. Steve uses him as a stepping stone to jump through the same window. 

\--

“Give it a rest, buddy,” Ray Palmer coughs through the soot. 

Mick looks at him sharply as if to say, Really? Darhk is going to kill us and you’re quoting Vines? 

Ray wants desperately to laugh hysterically but he doesn’t want to die from smoke inhalation, or from anything for that matter, just yet. He wishes he’d paid more attention to Sara when she’d offered to teach him how to dislocate his shoulder to get out of this specific kind of League of Assassins bind. 

Darhk turns his eyes, two perfectly pitch-black pools, sharply to Ray and he growls something in Latin and now Ray wishes he’d paid more attention to Constantine when he’d been on board the Waverider. Stop it, he reminds himself. Don’t think about what you don’t have. Think about what you do have; you have Mick – always a plus, even if he is currently distracted by all the fire and his raging fire-boner – you have your brain, the most powerful part of the ATOM suit – no that’s the neutron star that powers the suit – not helpful, anxiety! And, besides, Mick managed to sneak out that message to that CIA agent, so help is definitely on the way, unless –, 

And at that moment, Mallus-Darhk turns his pitch-black-evil eyes onto the rafters in the warehouse and telepathically pulls the blond CIA agent with the hawkish face and the bow and arrows – what? – out from his hiding place to the middle of the not-satanic summoning circle. Something like a frisbee came flying at Mallus-Darhk’s head and momentarily distracted him from crushing the not-Green-Arrow to a bloody pulp for his dark magic ritual and Ray felt someone tugging at the binds around his wrists until he, too, was hauled up by Mallus-Darhk towards the center of the dark magic circle. 

Well, Ray thinks as he strains to graze his fingers against Mick’s, at least we’re together. That’s always a plus. 

It’s at that moment when an honest-to-goodness cyborg-angel drops down from the ceiling with someone who looks more like salvation than like a terrifying war goddess in tow, covered in red hellfire. 

And the whole world goes white.

\--

So, the guys they rescued, Sam learns, are actually time-travelers – but not time-travelers from their universe but from a different universe. from a universe that also has heroes and bad guys and people just trying to get by and something called Big Belly Burger which is apparently infinitely better than Shake Shack (blasphemy…). 

Honestly, Sam is coming down off an endorphin high and is looking forward to crashing on Steve’s ridiculous pectoral muscles and for a week of R&R with Bucky’s therapy goats (patent pending). 

But he’s not out of it enough to fail to notice Nakia whispering something to them and slipping them a piece of paper and a photo of Erik Killmonger. 

He tries not to think about what he'd do if he had a time machine. He doesn't think its his place to interfere with the way that things ended. If it hadn't been for Riley on that night, Sam Wilson wouldn't exist now and he can think of at least two dumbass white boys who would do anything to keep him around for some reason. 

Happy endings abound.

**Author's Note:**

> I had so much planned for this work, I was seriously planning a 10K monstrosity but literally a week after signing up for this challenge, I got seriously ill and I've been bedridden until pretty much two days ago from today (8/24/18). Anyway, I scrounged through my notes and I managed to cobble together this little one-shot.   
> I like it, but I'll always dream about what could have been, *le sigh*...


End file.
